What's Political or Cultural about Political Culture and the Public Sphere?

Toward an Historical Sociology of Concept Formation Author(s): Margaret R. Somers Reviewed work(s): Source: Sociological Theory, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Jul., 1995), pp. 113-144 Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/202157 . Accessed: 27/08/2012 12:36
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What's Political or Cultural about Political Culture and the Public Sphere? Toward an Historical Sociology of Concept Formation*
MARGARET R. SOMERS

University of Michigan
The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere converges with a recent trend toward the revival of the 'political culture concept" in the social sciences. Surprisingly, Habermas's account of the Western bourgeois public sphere has much in common with the original political culture concept associated with Parsonian modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, the concept of political culture is used in a way that is neither political nor cultural. Explaining this peculiarity is the central problem addressed in this article and one to follow. I hypothesize that this is the case because the concept itself is embedded in an historically constituted political culture (here called a conceptual network)-a structured web of conceptual relationships that combine into Anglo-American citizenship theory. The method of an historical sociology of concept formation is introduced to analyze historically and empirically the internal constraints and dynamics of this conceptual network. The method draws from new work in cultural history and sociology, social studies, and network, narrative, and institutional analysis. This research yields three empirical findings: this conceptual network has a narrative structure, here called the Anglo-American citizenship story; this narrative is grafted onto an epistemology of social naturalism; and these elements combine in a metanarrative that continues to constrain empirical research in political sociology.

Concepts are words in their sites. Sites include sentences, uttered or transcribed, always in a larger site of neighborhood, institution, authority,language. If one took seriously the project of philosophical analysis, one would require a history of the words in their sites, in order to comprehend what the concept was.... One conducts the analysis of the words
in their sites in order to understand how we think and why we seem obliged to think in certain ways. If one embraced more specific conjectures about the ways in which the condition for emergence and change of use of a word also determined the space in which it could be used, one would be well on the way to a complex methodology (Hacking 1990b:360, 362; emphasis added). * Send communicationsto MargaretR. Somers, Departmentof Sociology, Universityof Michigan,Ann Arbor, MI 48109; email: peggs@umich.edu.This paper was originallypreparedfor the Sociology of CultureSection of the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, held in Cincinnati,in 1991. I thank Val Daniel, GloriaD. Gibson, WalterGoldfrank,John R. Hall, Don Herzog, HarryEckstein, Geoff Eley, MoustafaEmirbayer, Michele Lamont, Howard Schuman,JoEllen Shively, and Jeff Weintraub their comments on an earlier draft, for and JanetWolff for her commentsas discussantat the ASA. I owe special thanksto Jeff Alexander,CraigCalhoun, and Marc Steinberg,whose serious and extendedcriticalattentionhelped me rethinkand make this a betterarticle. Finally,I would like gratefullyto single out Renee Anspachfor her insights and generousintellectualcontributions to the realizationof this article. I conductedthe researchin part with the supportof a fellowship from the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Research, and as a Visiting Fellow in the departmentof Sociology, both at PrincetonUniversity.The researchwas also supportedby the generosityof a RackhamFacultySupportFellowship and Grant, a RackhamFaculty Recognition Grant, and special funds from the Office of the Vice-Presidentfor Science and the Arts, and RackhamGraduateSchool, all at the Universityof Research,the College of Literature, Michigan. Sociological Theory 13:2 July 1995 ? AmericanSociological Association. 1722 N StreetNW, Washington, 20036 DC

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The political cultureconcept is a rejuvenatedconcept with what many consider a shady past. It first dominatedthe conceptual horizon of political science and political sociology in the late 1950s and 1960s in the context of a flourishing postwar political sociology Now thatdemocratization focused on replicatingthe conditionsof Westerndemocratization. again dominatesthe world agenda, the concept has been revived by political scientists and sociologists in the late 1980s and 1990s (see, e.g., Alexander 1991, 1992a; Alexanderand Smith 1993; Eckstein 1988; Laitin 1988; Lipset 1990; Putnam 1993; Tarrow 1992; Wildavsky 1987). Attributionsof its shady charactercome from the company it kept in its first life. The political culture concept was associated originally almost exclusively with modernizationtheories, Parsonian-influenced political sociology, and the behavioristrevolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Soon much was made of its inherentconservatism(Buxton 1985), and it was effectively felled by the more radical social science critiques of the late 1960s and 1970s (see, e.g., Tilly 1975a, 1975b, especially pp. 603-21). Yet the recent
publication of an English version of Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public

Sphere ([1962]1989) suggests that it was wrong to blame Parsons, modernizationtheory, or ideological conservatismfor the problems of the political culture concept. Habermas's accountof the rise and fall of a liberaldemocraticpublic spherehas more Marxist-Weberian in common with the originalpolitical cultureconcept thanit has differences.Understanding the sources of these deeper similaritiesand their restrictiveconsequencesis the goal of this work. My central claim is this: whether called political culture or public sphere, in both its Parsonianand its Habermasian forms, the political cultureconcept is used in a way that is althoughit is orientedto public affairs, hardlypolitical or cultural.In the case of "political," these thinkers'concept of political culture is shaped fundamentallyby the anti-political, private side of political sociology's "greatdichotomy" (Bobbio 1989) between the pubtheir concept lic/state and the private/societyspheresof social life. In the case of "cultural," cultural.What accounts than to what is recognizably refers more to what is "naturalized" for this peculiarityof the political cultureconcept? And what differencedoes it make?The aim of this article, and of a sequel to appearin the next issue, is to answer this question. In these articles I hypothesize that the Parsoniansand early Habermasuse the political cultureconcept in this curious anti-politicaland naturalisticway because the concept itself is embedded in a political and cultural structure.This particular300-year-old political citizenshiptheory. culturalstructure (Hall 1992; Rambo and Chan 1990) is Anglo-American To understandthe peculiarities of the political culture concept, the internal logic of this theory can be made visible by viewing it as a conceptual network.This demands nothing
less than an historical sociology of concept formation. Fortunately, many of the analytic

tools for developing this methodology are alreadyavailablein a body of rich scholarship that can be groupedloosely underthe rubricof a "new"political cultureproject.Under this heading I include recent work in culturalhistory and sociology, the history and sociology of science, institutionalism,and networkand narrative analysis. By examining the original culture concept through the lens of this new, broadly conceived approach to political political culture, we can use the political culture concept as its own reflexive instrument, therebyturningthe concept back on itself. Social scientists in recent years have come increasinglyto recognize that the categories and concepts we use to explain the social world can themselves be fruitfully made the objects of analysis. The work of turningsocial science back on itself to examine the often conceptual tools of research-fundamental categories such as "agency" taken-for-granted and "order"(Alexander 1982, 1992a), "structure" (Sewell 1992), "gender"(Scott 1988), Collins, and Lukes 1985; White 1992), and "society"(Tilly 1984)"person"(Carrithers, sociology (Bourdieuand falls under the rubricand the mandateof practicinga "reflexive"

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Wacquant1992; Collins 1988; Woolgar 1992). The work of reflexivityis above all historical: it challenges us to explore the historicity of our theoreticalsemantics as well as our epistemological foundations(standardsof knowledge), usually to discover that they themand selves have histories of contestation,transformation, social relationships.Such histories are not unlike the more straightforwardly social phenomenathat we study regularly.When aimed specificallynot at whole disciplines or even theories,but towardour presuppositional conceptualvocabulary,this task entails an historical sociology of concept formation(Canguilhem [1966] 1978; Foucault [1966]1978; Gutting 1989; Hacking 1988; Stinchcombe [1978]1982; Tilly 1984; Wallerstein1991). The method points to a way of practicingsocial researchbased on the principlethat all of our knowledge, our logics, our theories, indeed our very reasoningpractices,are marked indelibly (although obscurely) with the signature of time, normativity,and institution building. Like other such ideas in the sociology of science, such as "paradigm" (Kuhn), (Althusser),"doxa"(Foucault),and "styleof reasoning"(Hacking),an historical "episteme" sociology of concept formation emphasizes what we now find to be relatively uncontroversial-the historicity of thinking and reasoning practices. An historical sociology of concept formationdiffers from the classical approachof Mannheim'sor Marx'ssociology of knowledge in that it does not seek the deep social interests from which theories are derived.Nor does it seek any particular of beliefs, ideologies, or truths.Ratherit looks set for the conditions of possibility, or the conceptual networks within which concepts are framedand constrained.It aims to explain how concepts do the work they do, not why they do so in terms of interests, by reconstructingthe public histories of their construction, resonance, and contestedness over time. Empiricallyexploring such histories can help us work throughmany basic impasses in theoreticaland empiricalsocial science. The conceptual network surroundingthe political culture concept is Anglo-American citizenship theory. First formulatedin the seventeenthcentury by John Locke, and more generallyexpressedin political Liberalism,this theoryis actuallya story of the sociological foundations for preserving "English liberties" and the liberal democratic institutions to which those liberties gave rise. The foundationalelements of the Anglo-Americancitizenship story have survived intact over three centuries and continue to shape the political culture concept today.1A majorreason for the tenacity of this story is that it was mapped onto a sophisticated modem social science epistemology in which nature provided the criterionfor evaluatingknowledge. When these two featureswere combined-that is, when the narrativewas grafted to the epistemology of social naturalism-the narrative became "naturalized." outcome is what historiansand social scientists recently have come to The call a metanarrative.Metanarratives, we will see, are among the most enduring,most as flexible, and most troublesomeof social science culturalschemas.2

1 Of course, it is an empirical of questionjust how stable and how durablethe metanarrative Anglo-American citizenship theory has been underany given circumstances.To be sure, it has never been withoutcompetitors;the so primaryone is that of civic republicanism,as Pocock (e.g., 1985) and others have demonstrated spectacularly over the last 25 years. 2 Following Marchand Olsen's (1984:747) similarcomplaintthat "whatwe observe in the world is inconsistent with the ways in which . . . theories ask us to talk,"my complaint about Anglo-Americancitizenship theory is not philosophical but an "empiricalprejudice"generated by research into the historical processes of English democratization citizenship rights. This researchhas produceda view of the meaning and making of political and cultures of democratization which is alternativeto the Habermasianmodel and to the dominantpolitical sociological paradigm(see, e.g., Somers 1993, 1994, forthcoming).But the subjectof this articleis neitherthatevidence nor my alternativereconstruction citizenship formation;rather,it is a prolegomenonto a full exposition of that of alternativestory. Such a prolegomenon is needed because the dominant approachis not susceptible to direct empirical criticism based on competing evidence; when such evidence is confronted, it is redefined or ruled inadmissibleby the adjudicativerole of the prevailingmetanarrative Anglo-Americancitizenship theory.Like of a paradigm,a metanarrative only provides the range of acceptableanswersbut also defines both the questions not

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Fromthe outset, the political cultureconcept has occupied a prominentplace in this story. Its seventeenth-century task was to provide cohesion for the domain of civil society (soon simply society), the newly discovered site of market exchange believed to provide the foundation for English liberties. Although defined as part of the privatedomain, the very identity of the political cultureconcept nonetheless was made to depend on its criticaljob
of adjudicating and guarding the boundaries between public and private. When a concept

is embedded in such a deeply naturalized metanarrative,it cannot be destabilized by competing evidence or routine empirical investigation. As a result, political sociologists' research in political culture has been constrainedempirically across the ideological spectrum. Both Parsons and Habermascorrectlyunderstoodthe importanceof political culture in mediating between state and market/society.Both understood that in principle this normativedimension should be given a sociological significanceof its own as a "third" site state. Yet when Parsons and Habermas mediating between marketsand the administrative engaged with the political culture concept, they were engaging with a hardenedcultural networkof which the single concept is an inseparablecomponent.As a result, the political culture concept came to be reduced to a functional requisite of an autonomous private marketsociety. To understandthis dynamic, I first look more closely at the Parsonianand Habermasian political culture concepts; second, I examine the "new"political culture project as it has been used recently by social historians and cultural sociologists; and third, I outline the principles of an historical sociology of concept formation.In the sequel article I will use this historical sociology of concept formationto explore the place of the political culture concept in the deep structureof Anglo-Americancitizenship theory and, finally, to show of how the metanarrative this theory continues to constrainthe use of the political culture in contemporarypolitical and social research. concept POLITICALSOCIOLOGYAND THE POLITICALCULTURECONCEPT The social sciences discovered the political culture concept in the late 1950s and 1960s. Almond's(1980:26-28) more recentrevisitingof the differentaccentsplaced on the concept by (for example) Almond and Verba (1963), Beer (1962), Converse (1964), Dahl (1966), Lipset ([1960] 1981), and Pye and Verba(1965) reads like a Who'sWhoin AmericanSocial Science and indicatesthe centralityof the concept in the 1960s. The idea of political culture resonatedwith several preoccupationsof postwarAmericansocial science. These included the generalconcernaboutcommunistupheavalsand postcolonialThirdWorldindependence movements; a shift in the social sciences away from the study of formal institutions and toward a focus on political attitudesand voting practices;and the self-defining project of political sociology to distinguish itself from political science by its focus on the social conditions for democracy. This last preoccupation, however, was not new. Following the lead of Tocqueville, Schumpeter(1943:297) set the intellectualagendafor postwarpolitical sociology: "Democracy in the sense of our theory . . . presided over the process of political and institutional change by which the bourgeoisie reshaped, and from its own point of view rationalized, This statementcontains the the social and political structurethat precededits ascendancy." on which modem political sociology came to rest-the basic dyadic causal presuppositions model of political sociology. First, the dichotomizationof state and society is the point of
to be asked and the rules of procedureby which they can rationallybe answered.No alternative empiricalapproach to the roots of an Anglo-American political culture of democratizationcan be considered seriously until the is power of the dominantmetanarrative challenged historically.On this point, both Tilly (1984) and "gatekeeping" Wallerstein(1991) have writtenelegantly and convincingly.

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departurefor political sociology (Alford and Friedland 1985; Pizzoro 1971; Runciman 1969); a clear analytic distinctionhad to be establishedbefore the relationshipbetween the two could be examined. Second, the explanatorybasis of political sociology's scientific orientationin political science toward projectis distinguishedexplicitly from the traditional formal institutions:"Politicalsociology startswith society and examines how it affects the
state . . ." (Bendix and Lipset 1957:79).3 Finally, Schumpeter's statement reflected what

came to be a virtualempiricalpresupposition: that western Europeandemocratization was the political outcome of the rise of bourgeoiscapitalismin the nineteenthcenturyand would continue to be so in the tumultuoustwentieth. Each of these presuppositionswas to be incorporatedfully into the political cultureconcept.

Phase 1 (1950s-1960s):

Political Culture in the Parsonian Tradition

The obvious empiricalproblemsof this monocausaland unidirectional link between society and politics set the stage, in part, for the turn to the political culture concept in the late 1950s. Political sociologists were observing that similar industrializingprocesses were producingvariouslevels of stabilityin the leading Westernindustrialnations of Britain,the United States, France, Germany,and Italy-a problem that Jessop (1978:12) later called the "obstinatefact that capitalism is not universalisticallyassociated with formal political democracy"(also see Therbor 1977). Unmediated macro processes of industrialization clearly were not sufficient to explain the wide empirical variationin political outcomes among industrializedand (especially) industrializingnations. The logical solution was to examine intervening variables. Many were introduced;among the most influential were regulated industrialand political conflict (Dahrendorf1959), "cross-cuttingsocial cleavages" (Lipset and Rokkan 1967), and a highly developed set of social conditions ancillary to economic development,such as literacy,legitimacy,education,and technologicalappurtenances (Lipset [196011981). Yet it was Talcott Parsons'stowering position in the social sciences which suggests why the predominantreaction was to adopt a more normative perspectivethat emphasized the interveningcultural orientationsconducive to democratization.4 Talcott Parsons had long grappled with the enduringproblem of "meaningand moral order"(Wuthnow 1987), and he arguedforcefully for distinguishingbetween culture and society in social systems (Kroeberand Parsons 1958; see especially Eckstein,forthcoming). Whereas society should refer to the system of interactionbetween individualsand collectivities, cultureshould addressonly "values,ideas and other symbolic-meaningful systems" (Kroeber and Parsons 1958:582-83). Addressing the dilemma of how normative action could coexist with a law-basedsocial system, Parsonsarguedthat a sociological theory had to attributemeaning as well as instrumentality action (also see Parsons 1937). (It made to sense that political sociologists should be especially motivatedto balance normativewith social explanations;after all, political processes such as movements for democratization inevitably involve both systemic macro phenomena-e.g., wars, depressions, industrialization-and social actions to which humans assign meaning and sometimes even devote their lives.) To this end Parsons developed his tripartiteschema, which differentiated analyticallybetween three systems: the social, the cultural,and the psychological. Parsons
3 The "state,"in this usage, meantthe political system -for example, democratization totalitarianism or (Tilly 1975b). This provokedSartori's(1969:92) exasperatedblast that "politicalsociology is often a misnomer,for what on underits name is often a 'sociological reduction'of politics"-an observationthat contributed the trend to goes toward"bringingthe state back in" which swept the social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s. 4 Parsons wrote his own version of democratizationand modernizationafter the defining works in political cultureconcept had been written (see Parsons 1967, 1971).

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believed that these distinctions capturedthe deep analytic truththat all social interactions included dimensions of all three: indisputablerootedness in the social system, meaningful referenceto the culturalsystem, and causal influenceby psychological motivations(Parsons and Shils 1951). Parsons thus created the major alternativeboth to the (then) reigning anthropological definitionof culture,which dated back to E.B. Tylor'sview that cultureincluded all human practicesbeyond the biological, and to the Marxistand sociology of knowledge subordination of culture to materialforces, the environment,or class power. In moving away from both of these positions, Parsons took the first step towardwhat sociologists began to call a "normativetheory of culture"-so called because the idea distinguishedbetween ideals and meaning, on the one hand, and the more all-inclusive anthropological"wayof life," on the other (Jaegerand Selznick 1964; Swidler 1986). This was an enormousmove forward for the social sciences, and Alexander(1990, 1991, 1993), Cohen and Arato (1992), Smelser (1992), and Wolfe (1989) are among those who most recently have reminded us of the significance of this achievement. Parsons, however, then made a consequentialdecision in his approachto culture-one which implicitly reflectedhis disciplinarycommitmentto establishingfirm epistemological boundaries for the foundations of sociological knowledge.5 He was concerned that if culturalcodes and symbolic systems were conceived as completely independentfree-floating symbolic systems, culture would not be regardedas a legitimate part of sociology. If, however, the notion of culture were treated as the socially institutionalizednorms and subjectivelyinternalizedsocial values of a social system (Swidler 1986), the social sciences would undergofusion ratherthan fission. This shift from the analytic autonomy to the internalizedreduction of culture was an move for Parsonsand for sociology. The tremendousadvancesin the Parsonian unfortunate attentionto culture were canceled out with one stroke-ironically, the same stroke he had used initially to define a sociology of culture.If a conception of culturewas to contribute to (and,indeed, count as) social knowledge,Parsonsarguedthatit would have to be attached to the subjectivities of socially inculcated individuals and collectivities. Yet although this position gave the cultureconcept the promiseof a centralplace in social analysis,in research practice it acquiredonly a functionalrole in the social system (Alexander 1990:5; Camic 1986:63-69; DiMaggio and Powell 1991:17). On this Parsonianfoundation,then, postwarpolitical sociologists and political scientists introduced the political culture concept as a critical intervening variable for explaining democratic political outcomes (Almond 1980:26-27; Eckstein forthcoming).6Following
5 I owe this formulationof Parsons's"consequentialdecision" regardingculture to Alexander (1988, 1989b, 1990). More importantthan any single publication, however, is the message that can be read in the personal intellectual trajectoryAlexander forms with Parsons's work. Although the casual reader no doubt associates Alexander with the first major attemptof the post-Parsoniangenerationto uncriticallyrehabilitateParsons, the picture is actually a great deal more complex and historically developmental. Originally drawn to Parsons conception of agency in culture and meaning (Alexander 1983b) in an attempt to ground a "nonrational" (something that he demonstratedwas missing in Marx, Durkheim,and Weber alike [Alexander 1982b, 1983a]), Alexander quickly came to distance himself from Parsons's overwhelming cultural reductionism.Through an immanentcritique of Parsons, he helped to create the version of post-Parsonian(one could say anti-Parsonian) semiotic sociology of culture first representedin his Durkheimcollection (Alexander 1988; also see especially Hunt 1988), worked out most systematicallyin Alexander (1989a), elaboratedin Alexander(1990), and demonstratedempiricallyin Alexander(1992a, 1992b, 1994) and Alexanderand Smith (1993). As I discuss later in this essay, this approachuses structurallinguistics to demonstratethe benefits to be gained for sociological analysis in recognizing the analytic-although not the concrete-autonomy of codes and structuresin culturalresearch. 6 Among the best-knownclassics of the period for political sociology are Almond and Powell (1966), Almond and Verba(1963), Banfield (1965), Black (1966), Deutsch and Foltz (1963), Eckstein (1964), Lipset [1960]1981, Pye (1962, 1965) Pye and Verba (1965), Smelser (1959), and Verba and Nie (1973). The recent revival of the concept that follows loosely in the same traditionincludes Eckstein (1988), Huntington(1993; also see responses in subsequentissues), Thompson,Ellis, and Wildavsky (1990), and Wildavsky (1987).

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Parsons'sconception of culture more generally, these thinkers defined political culture as the "subjective feelings, attitudes, and consequent behaviors" believed to characterize individualand collective "politicalorientations"-that is, values-across a political system (Rosenbaum1975:4). A political cultureconsolidatedthe "underlying psychologicalforces" and the political "attitudes" believed to shape much of civic life and political behavior.This definition combined broad issues of cultural affect with the specific issues connected to democratic stability; thus conceived, the political culture concept opened a window to a of deeper understanding numerouspolitical events and processes from coups and revolutions in Africa and Latin America to civil war in NorthernIreland. In applying the concept, social scientists specified its dimensions as following a continuum from "integrated" "disintegrated," to representingthe degree to which "most people" have "similar,or compatible political culture orientations" which are "congenial"to their political institutions. Congenial values and orientationswere used to explain degrees of accommodationto a society's stability; dysfunctionalvalues were invoked to account for disruptivebehavior such as strikes and protests against governmentactions (Almond and Verba1963; Pye and Verba1965). In combination,these core elements of a political culture were perceivedas the fundamentalvariablesexplaining "thecreationand maintenanceof a society's fundamentalpolitical order"(Rosenbaum 1975:6). Political sociologists thus were poised to take advantageof Parsons'snormativeschema for bringing together social and political cohesion. The political cultureconcept was just the variable they were seeking to intervene between what they assumed to be the indeand the varying cross-nationaloutcomes in pendent variable of capitalist industrialization degrees of democratic stability. Although Almond (1980:19) later insisted that "political cultureis not a theory;it refers to a set of variableswhich may be used in the construction of theories . .. ," it certainly functioned as a theoreticalmodel that spoke directly to the search for a modulatednormativeconnectionbetween a definite conception of society and politics, and as a mechanismto "bridgethe micro-macrogap in political theory"(Almond and Powell 1966:51-52; Almond and Verba1963:32; Pye 1965:9). The dependentvariable reflectedthe need to state clearly how political democracywas to be defined-namely, as a system of high political stability under a representativegovernment.The independent variableof economic developmentfirmly groundedthe political culture concept in social science knowledge. Most important,as an interveningvariable,political cultureaddressed the empiricaland normativedissatisfactionwith "vulgar" economistic explanations.7 The model can be illustratedin the most celebratedrepresentation the genre, Almond of and Verba'sThe Civic Culture (1963). There the authorsintroduce political culture as a bases of politics to its institu"linking"concept designed to connect the social structural tional outcomes:the political cultureconcept serves as "theconnectinglink between microand macropolitics"(pp. 1-3, 33). They suggest that all political systems have legitimating symbols and that these systems exhibit a greater or lesser degree of popular consensus regardingthose symbols. In a democratic political culture, or a "civic culture,"citizens contributeto the maintenanceof the democratic system by three kinds of "internalized aspects"or orientationstowardlegitimatingsymbols-cognitive, affective, and evaluational (p. 15). Repeating his debt to Parsons, Almond (1980:26-27) reflects on the original to political cultureconcept as one "adapted the analysis of the culturalpropertiesassumed to be associated with democraticstability,"which led them to stress "politicalknowledge and skill, and feelings and value orientationstowardpolitical objects and processes."
7 Much the same kind of 'interveningvariable'argumentcontinues into the present to be used in empirical research, even though the original use of the political culture concept has become somewhat less prominentin this research.See, for example, Bollen and Jackman(1985); for contrastsee Eckstein (1992, forthcoming).

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In another classic of this genre, Smelser (1959) posits that early nineteenth-century English working-class social movements were the result of a transitionalconflict between values attachedto a domestic artisanaldivision of labor and the alienating the "traditional" "rolestrain" producedby conflicts over new values demandedby the industrialfactorylabor French trade unions were the process. Similarly, Lipset (1967) suggests that "extremist" values of Frenchemployers (attachedto a pre-moder economic result of the particularistic system), which "lagged behind" the universalist values necessary to modern capitalist markets.8The only epistemological status grantedto the actual codes and meanings of a political culturewas the argumentthat "socialprogress"could be impededby "backwards" values which lagged behind long after traditional societies had been transformedinto modem social systems. According to Banfield's (1965) famous theory, for example, the political culture of southernItaly contained values and practices so "morallybackwards" that it left the region in no condition to receive the benefits, or take on the responsibilities, of Westerneconomic progress.9 What, in retrospect,were the strengths of the Parsonianpolitical culture concept, and why has it seen such a strong comeback of late? The first strength was its empirical into methodology.Because culturalattitudescould be aggregatedand empiricallytranslated a range of variables,this work became known as "theempiricaltheoryof democracy"(e.g., Barry 1970; Duncan and Lukes 1963; Pateman 1980). A political culture is the empirical of patternformedby the social distribution these attitudes(Almond and Verba1963:12-14). Almond (1980:26) continues to celebrate the idea that "the explanatorypower of political culture variablesis an empiricalquestion, open to hypothesis and testing."By making the political cultureconcept empirical,one could counterParsons'soften-criticizedabstractness. Second, and more relevant to this paper, the political culture concept-and Parsonsshould be praisedfor giving the previouslyneglected interveningnormative/cultural sphere of civic culture a critical and well-deserved centrality in macrosocial explanation-an explanationwhereby both political and social life were mediatedinexorablyby normative culturaldimensions.10 transposingcultureinto societal norms, Parsons (1967) acquired By the analytic variable with which to argue for the normative cohesion of society. This theoreticalcombining of culture with politics became increasinglyprominentin Parsons's work as he became convinced that the normativeelement was most significantwith respect to the polity. The importanceof this triadicmodel, and the reason for the currentappealof the political culture concept, has been made strikingly apparentby the drama of recent events across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union-for example, the explosive impact of Poland's famous Solidaritymovement. Similarly,the intellectual significance of an independentsphere of political culture is underscoredby the flood of recent literature in political theory and sociology addressing the newly "discovered"sphere of civil or political society (e.g., Alexander 1991, 1992a, 1993; Alexanderand Smith 1993; Calhoun 1992a, 1992b, 1993; Cohen and Arato 1992; Keane 1988; Kennedy 1991, 1992; Putnam 1993; Seligman 1993; Somers 1993; Taylor 1990; Walzer 1991; Weintraub1992, 1995, forthcoming;Wolfe 1989).11 Ultimately,however, the broad arrayof criticisms overwhelmedthe strengths.Criticism
8 Examples can be found in Alexander and Seidman (1990). 9 See Putnam(1993) for a stunning revisitationof Italianpolitical culture that owes more to Tocquevillethan to Parsons. 10 The currentresurgenceof interest in culture attests to the enduringquality of this insight. 1 This theoreticalcombining of culture with politics became increasinglyprominentin Parsons'sown work as he became convinced that the normativeelement was most significantwith respect to the polity (Wolfe 1989:205). The importanceof this triadic model has been underscoredby (e.g.) Alexander (1991, 1992a, 1993), Alexander and Smith (1993), Bell (1989), Calhoun(1993), Cohen and Arato (1992), Keane (1988), Walzer(1990), and Wolfe (1989).

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was leveled at the rationalindividualistexplanationof political structure (Rogowsky 1976); at the "individualist" fallacy (Schuech 1969); at the unitarycultureof consensus embodied in the idea of a single national political culture (Mann 1970; Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990); and at the anti-institutionalabstractnessof the values constituting the political cultureconcept (Rueschemeyer,Stephens, and Stephens 1992). The most influential critical discussions at the time includedBarry(1970, Fagen (1969), and Tucker(1973), all of whom took issue with the political cultureliteraturefor attributing productionof the political structuresto the cultural domain. (Almond [1980:29-32] and others [Lijphard 1980] argue vehemently that this position is attributedwrongly to the political culture concept.)12 The preoccupationwith a "continuumof political integration," however, most sharply defined the political culture concept and located it in an historicalperiod and a Cold War intellectualcultureoverwhelminglyconcernedwith rapidglobal disequilibrium political and violence. The hegemony of this intellectualculture,as we now know, was to end abruptly. When political scientists and sociologists, using new macrostructural approaches,launched a full-scale assault on the paradigm in the late 1960s and 1970s, the political culture concept, not surprisingly,was one of the first casualties. Moreover, in the midst of an explicit search for the causes of political stability in the postwar world of nation building and decolonization, it is plausible that the fate of the political cultureconcept was sealed by its utility in addressingwhat had become the overridingsocial science concern-obsesof sion, one could say-with societal equilibriumand political instabilitycharacteristic the political climate of the 1950s and 1960s.13 Influencedby various versions of Marxism, Weberiantheories of bureaucracy, the and BraudelianAnnales school, the new structural approachesrejectedtheories of "backwards" cultures and values as explanationsfor social change or stability.Insteadthe new analyses stressed class dominationand emphasizeddeveloped nationsover underdeveloped nations, core over periphery,states over societies. Insofaras political culturewas addressedexplictheories of this period, it was usually addressedfor itly in any of the influentialstructural In purposes of criticism and rejection.14 light of the way in which social scientists constructed non-"modem"or non-Westerncultural practices as primitive and constraining forces on economic progress, political culturewas an idea that a new generationof social scientists was only too happy to abandon.15
12 Citing the original book (Almond and Verba 1963:chs. 1 and 15), Almond (1980:29) asserts that political cultureis treatedsimultaneouslyas both an independentand a dependentvariable,as "causing[political]structure and as being caused by it." 13 The concept also was tied to a massive researchmethodologythatwas cross-nationaland global, and entailed highly quantifiedsurvey research techniques. The monumentalgrowth of U.S. research technologies, most of which were government-sponsored, both cause and consequence of this context. U.S. scholars were sent all was over the globe to survey world populations in the belief that analyzing and comparing the global data would provide explanatorylinks between individualattitudesand behaviors and the very survival of political regimes (see especially Almond and Verba 1963:ch. 1). 14 Moore (1965), Tilly (1975a, 1975b), Wallerstein(1974), and Skocpol (1979) were among the most influential critics. 15 BarringtonMoore's (1965) comparativehistoricalanalysis of the varying routes to the "modemworld"was the text that set the terms for revisionistscholarship.Moore provideda monumentalchallenge to the antihistorical premises of political culture and modernizationtheory-that there exists a single "normal" developmentalpath to the modem world and thatdepartures from this patternare deviantand dysfunctionalratherthanalternative routes. By problematizingvariation rather than assuming deviance or "lags," Moore demonstratedhow comparative historical methodology could be used to address issues of social change and class analysis to a very different effect thanthatof modernization theory.In the 1970s Moore'smantlepassed to Wallerstein (1974) and to Anderson (1974) with the publicationof the first volumes of each of their projectedmultivolumerecastingsof the making of the Westerncapitalist world. Tilly's (1975a) Formationshould be regardedas the thirdpoint in this early triad of second-generationinfluences (if we consider Moore and Thompson the first generation)on the shape of the historic turn in macrosociology. See Skocpol's (1984) edited collection on historical sociology for the best summationof these influences.

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The demise of the political cultureconcept thus can be explainedin partby the emergence of a more radical 1960s social science. I propose, however, that it would be a mistake to leave it at that;its epistemological vulnerabilitieswere a deeperreason for the demise. The first sentence of the preface of The Civic Culturemay be the most revealing: 'This is a
study of the political culture of democracy and of the social structures and processes that

sustain it" (Almond and Verba 1963:vii; emphasis added). Although virtually all of the contemporarycriticism focused on the question of which variable-political culture or variable,this lucid declaration political system-should be grantedthe statusof independent remindsus that three variableswere at issue, just as in Parsons'sapproach: independent the variable(the social system), the interveningvariable(the political culture),and the dependent variable (the political outcome-in this case, democratic stability). Yet for actual research purposes, the independentvariable (economic development) was taken as given and exogenous, and was not subjectedto critical scrutiny,while empiricalresearchfocused exclusively on the relationshipbetween political cultureand political systems. Thus, despite its acclaim as an empirical theory, the most importantweakness in the model is that its causal theory is not posited as an empiricalquestion in which cause and effect are presented as a connection to be explained. Rather, the causal analysis is already inscribed in the concept itself, or (in slightly different terms) the independentvariable (social system) is inscribedat the outset in the intervening(political culture)and dependentvariables(democratic stability). In the laudableeffort to bring together society and culture,the latterwas collapsed into the former.16 Also, although the ultimate independentvariable"society"received the least attentionfrom critics at that time, in retrospectit is the most significant for the concerns of this essay. Where did the political values of a political culturecome from? How could variations in such values be explained? How do we explain democratization? Numerous mediating factors were presentedas partial answers (e.g., political socialization and psychological internalization),but the basic assumption-which never was subjected to empirical research-was that political culturewas a productnot of the culturalor the political system but of the social (market)system: culturalattributeswere "the product of socialization experiences"-a position "sustainedby much evidence" (Almond 1980:29).17The independentvariable"society"became at once the most importantexplanatorycomponent of the theory and the least scrutinized. The payoff was that the foundational place of "society" allowed the political culture model to be rooted firmly in social science logic ratherthanrisking its credibilityby associationwith speculativenotions of cultureas artistic or symbolic systems. The irretrievableloss was that we were left with an enduring What'scultural about this political cultureconcept?18 conundrum: The concept of culture in the Parsonianpolitical culture concept, thus, is more social than cultural.Now consider the concept of politics. What, after all, is the meaning of the term political? Cicero called the commonwealth a res publica, a "public thing" or the
16 For this reason it was described as a "sociological approach"(Barry 1970) in which liberal democracy is treated as a system and their goal is to specify the relationshipbetween the political and civic culture and the political structure. 17 Again, this can be tracedto Parsons'sfunctionalreductionism,in which he tried to create a complex interplay of differentsubsystems.Unlike Marx (and to some extent, as we will see, the early Habermas),Parsons'sproblem was not economic but functional reductionism(and, in his later work, his evolutionaryframe), and a failure to social movementsand social action in theirown culturalterms (Alexander1983b). As stressedrecently understand by Cohen and Arato (1992), Parsons placed great emphasis on the independence of the legal sphere and the institutionsof parliamentary government. 18 Alexander's(1989a, 1990, 1992b) immanentcritique of Parsons has made it possible to retain the cultural of impulse while moving beyond Parsons'sreductionismthroughthe incorporation an approachto political culture rooted in language as an analytically autonomouscultural system (also see Alexander (1992a), Alexander and Smith 1993).

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of "property a people." What is political has always been identifiedwith what is publicthat is, common to the whole community, such as the system of dispensing justice, the power relationshipbetween ruler and ruled, national policing, and economic regulation (Wolin 1960). Yet these scholars defined the very essence of such political concerns as belonging to the anti-political domains of privatesociety. Moreover,even the referenceto is "political" misleading.These are not beliefs associatedwith the practices,discourses,and but institutionsof democratization beliefs about the most appropriate regulationof private life. The impetus to make the political culture concept a third and interveningvariable between state and society was forcefully overdeterminedby the power of the deeper foundational divide betweenpublic and private. Why do we find this paradoxof a political culture concept defined as a people's anti-political identity?

Phase 2: Habermas'sPublic Sphere:Political Cultureas Bourgeois Rationality The recenttranslation Habermas's of Transformation the Public Sphere([1962]1989) has of made the "early" Habermas's discussion of the public sphere one of the most celebratedof new approachesto political culture. Yet althoughit is "newly"discovered,the connection between Habermas and the Parsonian version is actually surprisingly close. Habermas published his book originally in 1962, just one year before the publicationof The Civic Culture.The topic of these works, moreover,was virtuallythe same-the impactof public own reflections30 years afterhe wrote opinion on democraticpolitical systems. Habermas's his book reveal his own ambivalencetowardthe (then)prevailingAlmond and Verbaschool of the political cultureconcept. He recalls, on the one hand,that when he set out to address the subject in 1960, the sociology of voter behaviorwas only at its beginning in Germany, and there was a "glaringabsence"of studies under the heading of "politicalculture."On the otherhand,Habermasrecalls thatas late as 1963 Almond and Verbahad "stillattempted to capturethe 'civic culture'by means of a few attitudinalvariables"-a methodology he clearly set out to prove deficientby way of historicalanalysis (Habermas1992:438). These recent reflections, moreover,underlinejust how much distance 30 years has put between Habermas'srecent work and this earliest expression of his political sociology. A current assessment of his contributionas a whole to democratic theory and political sociology the would look very differentfrom the limited one presentedhere, and would demonstrate the most important influential and many reasonswhy Habermasis rightlyconsideredamong democraticthinkersof the 20th century (see, for example, Cohen and Arato 1992). In this article I addressonly his 1962 book, however,because it is this work that has become the source of currentdiscussions over the public sphere concept. Habermas([1962] 1989) uses the termpublic sphere to denote both the social space and the rationaldiscoursethat constitutefree and open democraticpublic opinion. For him, this is the normativepreconditionfor a democraticpolity: "by 'the public sphere'we mean first of all a realm of our social life in which something approachingpublic opinion can be formed. Citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion ... about matters of general interest" (Habermas 1974:49). In this formulation, Habermas reveals the degree to which his work on the public sphere is simultaneouslya normative theory and a sociological analysis of democraticpolitical cultures(Calhoun1992). Because the public sphere is the social space in which "the public organizes itself as the bearerof and public opinion,"Habermasperceivesit to be one of the centralorganizational normative more and otherthan a mere principlesof the modem liberalpolitical order:"Itis apparently scrap of liberal ideology that social democracy could discard without harm"(Habermas [1962]1989:4). Also, like those who studied the civic culture, Habermasviews the study

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of this complex of political culture as a sociological window into "ourown society from the perspectiveof one of its central categories"(pp. 4-5).19 The most obvious differencebetween this early Habermasian the Parsonianpolitical and Marxist slant and his more strongly structural historical cultureconcept is Habermas's and conception of political culture.It is generally acceptedthat in his early writings, Habermas was still rooted deeply in his Marxist inheritancefrom the Frankfurt School. Although the Parsonianpolitical culture concept is ultimately defined as internalizednorms/values,for Habermasit constitutesa quasi-institutional because it is institutional sphere. I say "quasi" in the literal sense of referring to public coffeehouses, newspapers, and other material expressions of public opinion, ratherthanto somethingthat is subjective,or composed only of people's thoughts and ideas-and yet still does not consist of state institutions. This dramaticdifference from the Parsoniannotion explains some of Habermas's currentappeal in that the term "sphere"serves as a metaphor for a structurallocale supported by institutions and discursive networks; thus at first glance it gives the realm of culture its institutionaland discursive due (e.g., Calhoun 1992; Eley 1992; Zaret 1992).20 More significant than their differences, however, are the underlying similarities shared by the two approaches.The major strengthof Habermas'spublic sphere concept parallels the most important strength of the Parsonian approach and accounts for much of its well-deserved current appeal. This is his attempt to describe and structurallylocate the public sphereas interstitialbetweenpublic andprivate;thus it representshis effortto resolve the problematicpublic/privatesplit inheritedfrom political sociology. Habermas's political cultureconcept, which he calls the public sphere,thereforeis based on a triadicratherthan a dyadic model, one that explicitly recognizes the normativezone between the state and the marketas well as between the micro and the macro.Like the Parsonianpolitical culture concept, Habermas'spublic sphere is both distinguishedfrom and linked on both sides to the marketand the state; it demarcatesat once the end of the strictlyprivaterealm of civil society (here understoodsolely as the market) and the beginning of the "official"public domain of the state. This emphatic structuraldistinctionbetween the interstitial"public sphere"-creating a third space between the public and the private-and the official, institutionalbureaucratic state of the "public"side of the model explains the resonanceof Habermas's concept with climate. Habermasis theorizing about exactly what apparentlycame true today's political during the 1980s in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: a zone of civic life oriented towardpolitical issues and public life but free of the direct control of the official state and its coercive mechanisms. As in the Parsonianconcept, the discourse focuses on political matters.Hence the attribution"public"sphere: "We speak of the political public sphere . . . when discussion deals with objects connected to the activity of the state" political culture is (Habermas1974:49). Like the Parsonianconcept, however, Habermas's not partof the political spherein any institutionalsense: "Althoughstate activity absolutely is so to speak the executor,it is not a partof it . . ." (Habermas1974:49; emphasis added).
19 Habermashas been criticized for limiting his conception of rationalpublic opinion to that of a bourgeois practice (Calhoun 1992; Eley 1992:325-31; Fraser 1992; Somers 1993), for his economism and his exclusion of religion as a source of democraticpolitical culture (Zaret 1992), and for his unawarenessof the genderednature of bourgeois reason (Eley 1992; Fraser 1992). (Recently,however,he has addressedthe issue of genderexclusion in a particularlyintriguingway, formulatinghis reinvestigationof the issue by examining whether women were excluded from the bourgeois public sphere in the same fashion as workers,peasants, and the "people"-that is, as men lacking "independence"; 1992:427). As importantas these issues are, they are not my concerns here. Rather,I wish to addressthe assumptionsunderlyingHabermas'sargument,for despite some obvious differences however,to emphasizejust how they share significantstrengthsand limitationswith the Parsonian.It is important, far Habermassignificantly refined his ideas about the democraticpolitical process in the thirty years following the publicationof this early book. 20 Wuthnow(1987), for example, places Habermasin the structuralist category.

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Scholars generally agree that from this "thirdsphere"-whether called the public sphere, civil society (in the broad,associationalsense of the term),or political society-the Eastern Europeanrevolutionsof 1989 definitivelywere launched(see, e.g., Cohen and Arato 1992;
Kennedy 1991, 1992).21

The problem, it turns out, is that Habermascannot synchronizehis innovative analysis location of the public sphere with his depiction of the of the form or the triadic structural content of that sphere. In regard to content, also as in the Parsonianconcept, the triadic structuralmodel is overdetermined an ontologically prior and more deeply entrenched by substantivelydyadic model that is divided sharply between public and private zones: "It [the public sphere] was specifically a part of 'civil society,' . . . the realm of commodity exchange and social labor governedby its own laws" (Habermas[1962]1989:3). Also as in the Parsoniandichotomy,Habermas'ssubstantivenotion of the public side of this division state and its administrative is limited to the official bureaucratic apparatus-something of which Habermas is deeply wary as a source of democratic ideals. Moreover, although Habermas's public sphereis an arenafor political discourse,he arguesthat the citizens who
conduct this debate must be fully formed by private life in advance of their political

participation. Political identity, including fundamentalcommitmentsto democraticpracand tices, is formednot in the public arenabut in the privateworld of "socialization" market in conceptualizingthe public sphere, "presumesthat the privatesphere society; Habermas, provides it with fully formed subjects with settled identities and capacities" (Calhoun 1994:23). Habermas's public sphere and the identities of the citizens who people it are not constitutedby the participatory practices, the legal discourses, or the processes of democratic activity itself. Instead,as in the Parsonianmodel, the substanceof the public sphere derives from and is oriented towardcivil society, particularlythe cohesion of the market: 'The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of privatepeople come togetheras a public;they soon claimed the public sphereregulatedfrom above against the public authoritiesthemselves, to engage them [state authorities]in a debate over the
general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor" in particular, with regard to matters pertaining to

the working of national markets (Habermas[1962]1989:27; emphasis added). Less than practices of democratizationas such, these are only those rules which organize social life and the economy. This, in other words, is Marx'sbourgeois democracy-one that serves, of then, as an instrumentnot of the ruling class but of the bourgeoisrepresentatives society. HaberA more foundationaldichotomy between public and privatethus overdetermines mas's triadic divisions. The similarityin theoretical location of Habermas's public sphere to the Parsonianpolitical cultureconcept is immediatelynoticeable:the democraticpublic sphere of public opinion-although it may be oriented to "public"issues-causally is divide.22 situatedfirmlyon the privateside of the deeperpublic/private Althoughthis notion
21 Social historians-even before E.P. Thompson-influenced by anthropology (e.g., Hammonds, Tawney, democratic Polanyi), have long recognized the importanceof analyzing an independentzone of a participatory political culture as central to popular and bourgeois contributionsto the overall transformationto national democratic political institutions.(For a review of similar literatureby German social historians, see especially Eley 1992:294-306). 22 Craig Calhoun suggests that Habermasis more ambiguousas to whetherhis public sphere concept falls on the public or the privateside of the great dichotomy,and states that my characterization seems "halftrue but not altogether accurate."I would argue that the ambiguity lies precisely in the coexistence of Habermas'sexplicit desire to locate his public sphere in an intermediary triadic location between public and privatewith the deeper, more foundational,ultimately overdeterminingbinary public/privatedivision. Habermas's([1962]1989:30) own diagram demonstrateshis ambiguity, but makes clear his lexical ordering between the triadic and the dyadic models: he has drawn a set of double lines between the "privaterealm" and the "sphereof public authority," locating the "public sphere in the political realm"on the same side of those lines as "the private realm" and separatingthem only by a single, weaker line from the "realmof commodity exchange and social labor."

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of a democraticpolitical cultureis not literally "in the heads"of privatepeople in the form of individualvalues, as in Parsons'sapproach,nonethelessit is firmlytetheredwith a causal lifeline to the privaterealm of marketsociety. That lifeline explicitly preventsHabermas's political cultureconcept from floating over the divide into a truly independentthird sphere state. between the economy and the administrative Habermas's intellectualinfluences in partexplain this similarity.Like Americanpolitical famous declarationthat the new phenomesociologists, he was influencedby Schumpeter's ... born as a distinguishable non of capitalismwas the first"private sphere entity in contrast to the public"([196211989:19).Habermasalso draws from HannahArendt'sunderstanding of the "'public'relevance"of this new private sphere of civil society, in which market activity for the first time was "of general interest"(ibid.). This marketaspect of the private sphere assumes "publicrelevance"and makes possible the birthof the early political culture
of democratic public opinion. Concomitantly, it is the "stratum of 'bourgeois' . . . the

that and 'capitalists,'the merchants,bankers,entrepreneurs, manufacturers" was the "real as carrierof the public"as an opponentof public authority, the "publicof the now emerging public sphere of civil society ([1962]1989:23; author'semphasis).The only thing that made possible the critical free discourse of the public sphere, according to Habermas,was the
fact that it was private people who related to each other in that sphere as a public.

Most determinative,however, is the influence of traditionalpolitical sociology-both liberal political economy, such as that of the Scottish moralists,and Hegel and Marx.When we seek the origins of the ideas about political rule over social life in that tradition,we find that those ideas are an expression of civil society conceived via classical Liberalism as the realm of market relations. This legacy is most apparentin Habermas'shistorical analysis: 'The social preconditionfor this 'developed'bourgeoispublic spherewas a market as that, tending to be liberalized,made affairsin the sphere of social reproduction much as possible a matterof privatepeople left to themselves and so finally completed the privatization of civil society. The public sphere dependedon developmentalprocesses occurring
in the realm of social relations . . ." ([1962]1989:15) Here Habermas is unambiguous: this

specifically early finance sphere was the outcome of deep socioeconomic transformation, and trade capitalism, new commercial relationships,and particularlythe "trafficin commodities and news createdby early capitalistlong-distancetrade"(ibid; author's emphasis). In this argumentHabermaspostulates a causal homology of political discourse and the market; it is a model in which the expressions of what would become the grounds of democraticdiscourse "appearas the excrescence"(Eley 1992:292) of an accumulatingset or that clearly fit under the rubricof industrialization modernization. of transformations Insofaras the An additionalsuggestion in Habermas,moreover,ends in disappointment. content of the public sphere is formed by sources outside the market,it is formed by the "intimate" sphereof family. Yet even the family appearsto be a functionof marketrelations: into it" from a "space" who made up the public sphere"entered "Theprivatizedindividuals" that was "the scene of psychological emancipationthat correspondedto the political-economic one. Although there may have been a desire to perceive the sphere of the family
circle as independent ... it was . . . dependent on the sphere of labor and of commodity

exchange"(Habermas[1962]1989:46). In fact, the more closely we look, the more clearly of it appearsthat the public sphere is representedas a transmutation personal and market the domain of "public"issues regardingthe managementof socioeconomic privacy into life-something Habermasrefined dramaticallyin his subsequentwork. In Habermas'searly theoretical and causal model, as in the Parsonianpolitical culture concept, the causal variable of society (understood variously as social institutions by Parsons,as levels of economic developmentby Lipset, Almond and Verba,and others, and as the market by Habermas) is inscribed a priori in the public sphere/politicalculture but, on concept. If, on the one hand, the public sphere is the ground for democratization,

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the other,the conditions for the possibility of a public spherereside in the privaterealm of the market,ultimatelywe are left with the same question:What'spolitical or culturalabout the political culture (public sphere) concept? In regard to the political dimension, and inferringfrom his own discussion, Habermasmight give an answerthatpoints to the public sphere'saddresseesas constitutingthe "political"-that is, "theagents of the state and their policy makers."Yet this answercan hardlybe adequatein view of the overridingand more troubling assumptionthat the public sphere'spolitical and democraticideas appearto be spontaneouslyconstituted by marketforces.23As to the culturaldimension, we are at an even greaterloss. As in the Parsoniannotion, events in the public sphereappearto have no cultural meaning on their own terms; rather,they are norms that summarizethe actual activities of society.24Parsons's functional reductionismhas not yet substantivelybeen challenged by this early version of Habermas's public sphere concept. A NEW POLITICALCULTUREPROJECT The New CultureHistory An alternativeview of the relationshipof political cultureto democratization recently has social historians influenced by symbolic and structuralist developed among anthropology and linguistics, mixed with elements of Marx, Foucault,Bourdieu,and Hayden White, to result in what Hunt (1989) has consolidated under the "new cultural history."25 its In social historians,the political cultureconcept only occasionallyhas been incarnation among defined explicitly (see, e.g., Baker 1990; Chartier1991; Hunt 1989b; Sewell 1993). To give a schematic summation,practitionersof the new political cultureconcept insist, first, that historical actors' practices, activities, and political ideas must be viewed as symbolic systems with their own histories and logics; and, second, that these symbolic logics themselves are modalities of politics and power as much as they are culturalexpressions. Much of the new cultural history has been directed to studies of popular rituals and ceremonies (e.g., Agulhon 1981), of how culturalrepresentations Republicanrevolutionin ary practicesdisempoweredwomen in the years after the Revolution (Landes 1988), or of contests over the language in which political issues were articulated(Furet 1981; Hunt the 1984; Sewell 1980). These studies have transgressed boundarieslong prevalentin social history dominatedby Marxism and the Annales school-those between the "materiality" of social relations, the "ephemera" politics, and the merely "ideal"relevanceof culture of (Sewell 1993).
23 Although Craig Calhoundid not claim that this was an adequateanswer, he suggested it as one possibility. 24 The "medium" the of and public sphere,moreover,was "peculiar withouthistoricalprecedent:people'spublic use of their reason" (Habermas[196211989:27;emphasis added). As becomes much clearer in his later work, Habermas'streatmentof discourse is not rooted at all in notions of culture, as we usually think of that term, in either the sociological or the semiotic sense. Ratherit is based on speech act theory and pragmatism,very much the opposite of the culturaltradition,which comes from Durkheim,Saussure, and structuralism. especially See Alexander(1988b, 1992b, 1993) for convincing critiquesof Habermas's see hyperrationalism; Calhoun(1991) on the legacy of speech act theories of discourse ratherthan more recognizablyculturaltheories. 25 The best-knownof these include Chartier (1987, 1988, 1991), Furet (1981), Hunt (1984), Lacqueur(1991), Sewell (1980), and those writersrepresentedin Hunt's(1989a) collection The New CulturalHistory.The primary it developmentof this alternative conceptionis structuralist: comes from intellectualand social historians;cultural and literarytheoristsinfluencedby Europeansocial theorists;philosophersand linguists,notablySaussure,Derrida, culturaland structuralanthropologistssuch as Bourdieu (1977), Foucault, and Habermas(variablyinterpreted); oriented Douglas (1966), Geertz(1973, 1983), Levi-Strauss,Levi-Bruhl,and Sahlins (1981); and anthropologically social historianssuch as Natalie Davis (1975) and E.P. Thompson(1963). From Geertzcomes the idea of politics as culture;from Saussure,politics and cultureas linguistic systems; from Foucault,power and dominationat the micro level. This discussion is not intendedto be a complete review of the culturalstudies literatureon political culture.Rather,it is limited to a selected set of social historicalworks relevantto historicaland political sociologies of citizenship and democratization. From the standpointof cultural studies overall, there are obvious important exclusions such as the "Birmingham school" of culturalstudies or works dealing with class and statusdistinctions in contemporary Americanculture.

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Much of this historical work focuses on the French Revolution, using the French of structuralism Levi-Straussand the semiology of Saussureanlinguistics. The hallmarkof the structuralist semiotic approachto cultureand meaningis its rejectionof the singular and which Levi-Straussiansand Saussureansbelieved to be a voluntarist and "speech-act," misleading ideal-typicaltheory (Stinchcombe 1982). Insteadthis approachemphasizesthat cultural expressions must be viewed not as subjective meanings randomly "experienced" by social actors, but as elements embedded in systems of signs, symbols, and linguistic practices organized by their own internal rules and structures(Alexander 1990, 1992b, 1992c; Lamont and Wuthnow 1990; Saussure [1916]1964; Stinchcombe 1982; Wuthnow of 1987). Social actors engaged in speech or action are thus interpreters culture who are both constrainedand enabled by these sign codes and their internalrelationships.Studies based on this approachsuggest that social processes are intelligible only in the context of their culturalmediation. We can mention arbitrarilyseveral prototypicalexamples of the new political culture concept from Frenchsocial history and the work on the FrenchRevolution.Using semiotics as his intellectual weapon, Francois Furet (1981) launched one of the first and most of influential assaults on the long-reigning "social"interpretation the French Revolution. Instead of class struggle, demographics,or Braudelianmaterialism,Furet argued that the autonomyof politics and culturewas the drivingforce behindthe causes and consequences of the Revolution.Furet'sexplanationeschewed any form of interest-based analysis. Instead it focused on the impact and meaning of the new democraticrepublicanpolitical language of the revolutionary struggle. Instead of analyzing political forms in Mannheimianor Marxist terms-as ideologies or as aggregatedeffects of values or interests-Furet conceived of political forms in cultural terms as discourses possessing their own internal systems of logic. Ratherthan deriving from the social, Furet's"new political culture [was] driven only by its own internallogic of democracy"(Hunt 1984:11).
In Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt (1984) also developed

an influential and pathbreakingcultural explanation.Although she broadenedher use of actors,Hunt,like Furet, political cultureto emphasize conflict and the role of revolutionary insisted that social actions and political outcomes are unintelligibleunless one decodes the internal systems of political culture and the political forms at play in the revolutionary of process. Her theory rejectedthe analytic subordination political culturesto social values or deep economic processes as such, thus allowing her to look beyond the traditionalsocial science concept of the societal arenafor sources of popularpolitical consciousness, meaning, and action. As she arguedreflectively,this perspectiveallowed her to determinethat the ideology of democratic republicanism was not merely a "vehicle for the rise of capitalism, the rule of notables, or the establishment of a strong central state" (Hunt 1989b:2). By exploring topics such as the icons used in local parades,the changed content of the revolutionarycalendar,and how language facilitatedthe creation of new forms of revolutionaryaddress, Hunt's work expanded the notion of political culture. All of these elements, accordingto Hunt,must be viewed as political, and politicizing, forms of life-as process as are classes, social interests,and importantin making sense of the revolutionary the state (Hunt 1984, 1989b).26
26 Hunt explicitly acknowledges (and her work is exemplary for this acknowledgment)the broad range of influenceson her work, includingGeertz,Durkheim,Tilly, and Marx.In addition,as an anonymousrefereepointed out to me, Hunt'sbook can be seen as exemplifying the difficultyof the culturalstructuralist projectof integrating the culturalwith the societal "level."As was noted widely when it was published,Hunt'stext abruptlyand uneasily combines her cultural structuralismwith her historical sociology. The book is divided into two parts-the sociological and the semiotic, the Tilly and the post-Tilly.This difficultproblemis not solved by the new political culture concept (Archer [1988] tries to do so in Cultureand Agency), and it is importantnot to gloss over this point or to suggest that this importantchallenge is no longer much of an issue.

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Keith Baker (1982, 1990) and Roger Chartier(1982, 1988, 1991), fourth-generation Annaliste historians,also build on, but go far beyond, any strict structuralism. Baker and Chartierdeploy Foucault's (1972a, 1972b, [1970]1973, 1977) historical epistemological and structuresof power systems and Bourdieu'slinkage between culturalrepresentations and stratification, as well as critical and selective appropriations of Habermas's ([196211989) theory of the public sphere (for his critique, see Baker 1992). The result of this intellectual recombinationhas been an interpretationof the cultural origins of the French Revolution that overturnsthe traditionalevaluationof the influence of Enlightenment philosophy on the revolutionaryrupture.Baker and Chartier,by challenging the dichotomizationbetween principlesand culturalmeaningson the one side and "underlying" political and social realities on the other,have shown how culturaland ritualisticmeanings combined with practicesof sociability and association in forming a new and revolutionary political culture. Ratherthan serving as a dominantideology merely imposed on a public, these new culturalforms and practicesallowed Enlightenmentthoughtto be interpreted in but multiple ways, often contradictory, revolutionary.Baker demonstratesthe structuring power not of particular ideas but of the "field of political discourse, a set of linguistic patterns and relationships that defined possible actions and utterances and gave them worlds through meaning"(1982:212). Bringing togetherthe social and the representational the political culture concept, Chartiershows how "discursiveassociations"directly challenged the authorityof the Old Regime-whether throughthe democratizingimpulses of literary sociability or through the emergence of a modified version of Habermas'snew eighteenth-century public sphere (Chartier1991).

A New CulturalSociology In their interest in ritual and symbolic codes, culturalhistoriansalso have been joined by a new generationof sociologists of culture. While social historianswere turningto structuralistnotions of cultureto launchtheir assault on rigid versions of Marxistand Annaliste history, American sociologists began to address their own frustrationwith the prevailing macro and micro approachesto social life-both of which seemed to leave out too much and explain too little-and demonstrateda renewed approachto culture (for an overview see Mukerjiand Schudson 1991). But whereasthe social historiansformulatedalternatives to interest-basedcultural notions, sociologists primarilyaddressedthe limits of the Parsonian value-basedculturalsociology as the baseline for the new thinking(e.g., DiMaggio 1990; Griswold 1987, 1988; Hall 1987, 1992; Lamont 1992a; Lamontand Wuthnow1990; Sewell 1992; Swidler 1986, 1987; Wuthnow1987).27Moreover,many culturalsociologists have used some implicit notion of a political culture to demonstratethe degree to which cultureitself exists within symbolic systems and relationalpractices(e.g., Alexander1992b, 1992c; Alexanderand Smith 1993; Lamontand Foumier 1992; Mukerjiand Schudson 1991, Wuthnow 1990). The new generationof cultural sociologists are motivatedby the attemptto avoid two blind alleys. The first is the danger of confusing analytic autonomy with historical/phenomenological autonomy,something that the new culturalhistoriansappearto stray dangerously close to. In arguingfor the autonomyof culture,for example, the historiansopen new avenues of investigationsuch as the conceptuallanguages of politics, complex forms of power embodied in public and civil associations,and the ritualsof public social life. Yet even as they open some avenues for investigation,some of these culturalhistorianshave
27 Many of them have combined French semiotics with the post-Parsonianwork of Geertz (1973, 1983) to create what Alexander(1990, 1992b) calls a "late-Durkheimian" approachto the cultureconcept.

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closed off others. In their eagerness to abandonthe long-reigningdeterminismof the social sciences and to assert the autonomy of culture, for example, the semiotically inclined culturalhistoriansat times have tendedto locate "society"on one side of an analyticdivide and culture on the other. life." Dangers exist, however,in claiming an absoluteautonomyof culturefrom "material In the first place, this claim precludesexamining the role of culturallife in constitutingthe materialrealm-and we should all know by now that economic life is too importantto be left to the economists. Moreover, even in asserting that cultural and social analysis are "separatebut equal,"culturalhistoriansrisk reinforcingthe false dichotomy and the very epistemological hierarchybetween the materialand the ideal that they seek to transcend. To define culture as a separate sphere without examining the hierarchical distinction and between a social life that is deemed "natural" a culturallife that is deemed (merely) reinforces the privileged place of the social system as constructedor symbolic ultimately a naturalobject, free from "themediationof culturalcodes" (Alexander 1992b:294). Thus unless we call into question what is and is not construed as a "naturalobject," cultural historianswill ultimately"naturalize" society over cultureand find themselves in the blind alley of reductionismthat they sought to escape in the first place. The second blind alley the culturalsociologists attemptto avoid is the argumentfor the mutualconstitutionof cultureand society. This approachleads to what Archer (1988) calls the a "centralconflation,"which makes it impossible to disentangleand "untie" constitutive of their interconnectiondenies even relative autonomy to the elements. "The intimacy
components involved .... [I]n the absence of any degree of autonomy it becomes impos-

sible to examine their interplay (1988:80; emphasis added). (For a similar recognition of Archer,see Emirbayerand Goodwin 1994). Many of the post-Parsoniansociologists of culture, such as Alexander (1988, 1989a, and 1990, 1992b), Alexanderand Smith (1993), Archer(1988), Emirbayer Goodwin (1994), Kane (1991), Rambo and Chan (1990), and Sewell (1992), Griswold (1987, 1992a), that avoids these blind alleys of absoluteautonomyand conflation. elaborateon an approach avoid these impasses by distinguishing between analytic autonomy and concrete/ They empirical autonomy.The distinctionmeans that for researchit is importantto treatcultural structuresas analytically distinct from materialforces, exploring their internal logic and history apart from other domains of social life. In the analytic dimension, the "current of arrangement its units can be understoodprimarilyin terms of the earliertraditionsfrom which they have evolved" ratherthan in terms of their form's expressing material social forces or interests (Alexander 1990:9). The approach"assumes that both [symbolic and material forces] are always present as analytical dimensions of the same empirical unit" first must be treatedas analytically (Alexander 1992b:297). Yet althoughculturalstructures in concrete instances the two domains are intertwined.Precisely how the autonomous, symbolic and the materialare intertwinedand to what degree they overlap are empirical questions to be investigated ratherthan to be stipulateda priori. The cultural dimension "overlaps,but is not contiguous with, the society" (Alexander 1992b:298). of Sewell has elaboratedon this theme with his ingenious working-through the confusion the the surrounding term structure.He characterizes problemas one in which mainstream and especially macro-sociologists typically contrast "structure"with "culture":the "semiotically inclined social scientists [e.g., anthropologistsand anthro historians] ... regardcultureas the preeminentsite of structure... the term structureis assumedto refer to the realm of culture, except when it is modified by the adjective 'social'." As in the distinctionbetween schemas distinction,Sewell introducesa virtual/actual analytic/concrete tools of thought"as well as the "variousconvenSchemas are "fundamental and resources.

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tions, recipes, scenarios, principles of action, and habits of speech and gestures built up with these fundamental tools";resourcesare nonhumanmaterialobjects as well as "observable characteristics real people who live in particular of times and congregatein particular places"(Sewell 1992:8, 10). Like Alexanderand others,however,he insists that a complete sociological analysis must recognize that this separationis only analytic and that "sets of schemas and resources may properly be said to constitute structures only when they mutually imply and sustain each other over time" (Sewell 1992:13). With the assumptionthat cultureis both dependenton and autonomousfrom social life, sociologists vigorously are empirically comparing,conceptualizing,and documentingthe relationshipratherthan defining the problem in terms of the society/culturedualism. This tendency is evident in Alexander's(1992b) and Alexanderand Smith's(1993) work on the variable distributionof social events across a relatively stable set of cultural codes in American civil society; in Brubaker's(1992) work on the varying political cultures of citizenship across France and Germany;in Collins's (1981, 1988) comparativework on gender and class distribution,marriage,and propertyrelations across culturalsystems; in DiMaggio's (1992) work on the distributionof culturalcapital across groups;in Griswold's (1988) argumentsthat in the post-Parsonian approachto culturethe things to be explained are first the culturalobject itself and then-with great caution-the propertiesof a group or individual that engages with that object; in Lamont's (1992b) study of French and Americanculturalpractices,in which she problematizesand empiricallycompares,case by case, the variable relationshipsbetween culture and its "determinants"; in Swidler's and (1986) empirical applicationof her "tool kit" theory to differentdegrees of "settledlives." Analytic Assumptions From this rich literaturein history and sociology can be garnered some basic shared It assumptionson which the new political culture project is being constructed.28 is worth the inevitablerisk of oversimplification clarify these assumptionsin orderto identify the to differences between the new and the old, to suggest how the new political cultureconcept to provides alternatives the problematictheoreticaltraditionsin the earlierversions, to build a bridge between the new and the old, and to clarify the epistemological implications it offers for an historical sociology of concept formation.29 Definition. Whereas both the Parsonian and the Habermasianapproachesto political culture relegated culturalbeliefs to expressions of people's social and economic interests, ultimately generated by the propertiesof the social system (Baker 1990; Chartier1988; Hunt 1986, 1989a; Sewell 1993), the new concept defines cultureas a form of structurein its own right, constituted autonomously through series of relationships among cultural elements. Althoughculturalsystems may be viewed in partas the "accretion innumerable of social acts," they cannot be understood as internalized values or exteriorized interests (Alexander 1990:8). Rather,these political discourses exist as independentrelationalstructures in forms including legal doctrines,political or civil "societies,"and symbolic systems of moral distinctions in politics or people (see especially Sewell 1980, 1985, and Stinch28 Culturalstudies in general, especially popularculture,have become totally interdisciplinary; a result, the as assumptionsat work can baffle studentsfrom any single discipline (Mukerjiand Schudson 1991:5). 29 Again, a caveat:These assumptionsare not introducedas the basis for a claim thatthis new work has "solved" the problems of theorizing the place of political culture in society and in social analysis more generally.All of these assumptionshave weaknesses, such as the "dearth theoreticalpropositions" of concerningthe source of some of the structuralist's binary codes ("deep neurology?")(Wuthnow 1987:339). Rather,I take these assumptionsto be relevant to the specifically epistemological benefits of the new political culture concept, and to its ability to the help us understand limits of the old.

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combe's 1982 discussion of moral categories in structuralist analysis). These works thus pose profound challenges to the prevailing essentialism of social analysis, in which the meaning of something is believed to be establishedby defining its essence. In these newer works, meanings are conceived as relational meanings.Relationalityof meaning moves the references of a cultural element away from its true essence as a categorical intellectual object putativelyrepresentinga "real"social object with attributesthat can be categorized conceptually.Instead,individualmeaningsare conceived to be activatedonly in relationship to other meanings and in history. In incorporating books into social history, for example, Natalie Davis tells us that "a printedbook is not so much a source of ideas as a carrierof relationships"(Mukerjiand Schudson 1991:10).30 Causality and autonomy. Much of the criticism among contemporarysocial historians and cultural sociologists is directed toward traditionalMarxist, Annaliste, and Parsonian approachesto culture.This criticism is leveled at the reductionof culturalrepresentations to "epiphenomena" the materialor social world-if not in the "first" of then eventually "in the last instance." The new culturalists thus have vigorously challenged the claim that political cultures are caused, a priori, by the social system and/or its stages of socioeconomic development.By contrast,the more structuralist-influenced political cultureconcept is not "caused"by "the social" but develops and changes on the basis of its own internal rules and processes-as well as in historical interactionwith other domains of social life. Such political practices and discourses have meanings and histories partially internal to their own relationshipsand dynamics.31This causal autonomy in turn allows, even mandates, a centralrole for culturein structuring political outcomes. The structuring power of cultural discourses and codes permits political action to be understood in an entirely different way than that of a "fit"of political ideas with a social or political system, and calls into questionthe causal power of a social worldindependentof its cultural irretrievably mediation. Of course, causality and autonomy have always had at least two separateaspects. The first rejects the claim that cultureis caused by society or the economy in favor of the claim thatcultureis autonomous.The second asks whetherthis meansthatsociety and the material world themselves are caused by the cultural. The influence of structuralism,symbolic on anthropology,Bourdieu, and the poststructuralists the new cultural historians has led them to argue not only that social relationsare perceivedonly throughinterpretive gridscultural logics-rather than existing as "naturalobjects" in their own right, but also that cultural, symbolic, political, and social relations are mutually constitutive (see especially Sahlins 1976). Hence empirical investigations emphasize questions of how aspects of and political cultureare variablyappropriated utilized, made and remade,and to what effect.
The power-culture link in political culture. The political in the political culture concept,

as used by Parsons and Habermas,refers more to values and rationalideas about politics than to anything inherently "political."By contrast, the "political"in the new political
30 In recent works on the French Revolution, the array of topics addressed under the rubric of political culture-and thus thought to representvarious forms of culturalrules and codes-includes ongoing coffeehouse associations and reading societies (Chartier 1991); political symbols, festivals, and revolutionaryrituals (Hunt 1984; Ozouf 1988); journalistic techniques;the languages of politics (Furet 1981); Enlightenmentcategories of thought;republicanconceptions of Reason (Baker 1990); the daily life of the sans-culottes (male and female); and the gender dimensions of republicanism(Landes 1988). (For a deeply sociological definition of "representations,"see especially Chartier1988.) 31 In addition,more Geertzianapproachesposit that the meaning of the culturalsystem is constitutednot only by its own rules but also by the social activities that surroundit, and that actors create the meanings "as they go" in interactionwith the structuralforms (e.g., Sewell 1980, 1985). These, however, are still considered forms of culturalactivities. In this "dramaturgical" approachto the political cultureconcept, culturalpatternsare "assumed to play an expressive role in dramatizing and affirming the moral obligations on which social interaction depends-the moral order"(Wuthnow 1987:332).

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culture concept is used to vehemently reject the excessively "social" approach,which derives explanationsfor political ideas, symbols, and events from deeper social and economic phenomena,in favor of "the analysis of the political as such" (Baker 1990:1, 2-11; Hunt 1989a:1-22).32 We find differences of degree, however, in the terms in which the in "political" the political cultureconcept is elaborated-even amongthe culturalhistorians. Baker defines political culture as the "set of discourses or symbolic practices"by which "individualsand groups in any society articulate,negotiate, implement, and enforce the competing claims they make upon each other"(1990:4-5). In this sense, and drawingfrom Pocock's (e.g., 1985) work on how English political discourse embodies and structures actual political events, what is political is that "political authority is . . . a matter of linguistic authority:first, in the sense that political functions are defined and allocated within the frameworkof a given political discourse; and second, in the sense that their exercise takes on the form of upholding authoritative definitions of the terms within that discourse"(Baker 1990:5). In this conception of politics, Baker emphasizes, first, how the availablepolitical languages serve as the public symbolic frames in which historicalactors converttheir immediate "private" and, second, that the very notion experiences into political interpretations; of "interest"-which governs traditional approaches to politics-is itself inherently "a political one . . . a symbolic and political construction,not simply a preexisting social reality"(1990:5-6). The latitude of outcomes and analytic contingency made available to the social scientist in this politically conceived struggleover the power to defineis apparent in the problem that Baker sets for himself: "to show how the revolutionaryscript was from within the political cultureof the invented,taking on its power and its contradictions, absolute monarchy"(1990:4). For culturalhistoriansinfluencedmore strongly by Gramsci,Bourdieu (e.g., 1984), and the later works of Foucault, the power/culturelink is built into the very nature of the School"; symbolic logics, boundaries,differences,and demarcations(e.g. the "Birmingham see Grossberg,Nelson, and Treichler [1992]). These analyses tend to follow the lines of Marx's "dominantideology thesis" to analyze the "controlof subjectivityin everyday life of throughthe shaping of common sense and the naturalization social relations"-indeed, the very capacity to "impose a specific definition of reality which is disadvantathrough geous to others (e.g., Bourdieu's'symbolic violence)" (Lamontand Wuthnow 1990:29495). Foucault's later works in particular analyze culture through the "prism of the technologies of power,"which exist not only in the state but also in the everyday cultural interactionsof social life-visits to the doctor,sexual relationships,love, and schooling. In this approach,"poweris ubiquitousin social life, operatingin micro-level . . . and at the macro levels" (Lamontand Wuthnow 1990:295). Perhapsnot surprisingly, overarching this view of the culture/power relationship,which provides little room for exploring competing appropriationsof cultural symbols, has taken root primarily among studies of cultural hegemony; and less so among Frenchsocial historiansanalyzingthe popularrevolutionary overthrowof the ancien regime-one of the reasons, I believe, for the deservedexcitement about the publicationof Habermas'swork on the public sphere.33 In sum, the most dramatic distinguishing quality of the rejuvenatedpolitical culture concept is definitional:ratherthan a collection of internalizedexpressions of subjective
32 This quote is too good to pass up as representing social approachthatthe social historianswere rejecting: the "Since the preoccupationwith economic and social ends representsa broaderand more advancedstage in human developmentthan the preoccupationwith political and constitutionalends, so the economic and social interpretation of history may be said to representa more advancedstage in history than the exclusively political interpretation"(Carr[1961]1965:164-65, cited in Hunt 1989:6). 33 For importantcritiques see Alexanderand Sherwood (1993), Lamont (1989), Lamontand Wuthnow(1990), and Sherwood, Smith, and Alexander(1993).

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values or externalizedexpressions of social interests, a political culture is now defined as a configurationof representations practicesthat exists as a contentiousstructural and social in its own right. It bears little resemblance to the Parsonians'more social phenomenon psychological approachor to the dominantinterestsapproachof traditionalMarxism.Also, even though this definitionhas some points in common with Habermas's early writings on the public sphere, overall it rejects his explicitly "social"interpretation political cultural of developments. By existing as something apart from either the economy or the state, a political culture,when acted upon, will shapethe outcome,the meaning,and the very course of political action and social processes. These changes not only challenge the traditionalanswers to the question "Whatis the 'cause' of culturalphenomenaas objects of reality?"They also point to entirely new ways of analyzing political and social life as a whole. In the following section I suggest that when these new approachesare augmentedby recent work in the sociology of knowledge, science studies, and networktheory,they all lay the groundwork a sociology of concept for formationwhich then can be applied reflexively to the original political culture concept. TURNING THE POLITICALCULTURECONCEPTBACK ON ITSELF: TOWARDAN HISTORICALSOCIOLOGYOF CONCEPTFORMATION Having examinedthe new political cultureproject,we are now betterpositionedto ask what this work implies for the problem I posed at the outset of this essay: Why do political sociology's political culture and public sphere concepts appearto be neither cultural nor political? I hypothesize that this paradoxexists because the political culture concept itself is constrainedand defined by a political culture structure.In abstractterms, this structure can be defined as a conceptual network because it is a structuredrelational matrix of theoreticalprinciples and conceptualassumptions.As a relationalconcept the meaning of the political culture concept is produced, organized, constrained, and contained by its embeddednessin this conceptualnetwork.The internallogic of this networkthereforemust be made visible if we are to understandthe ambiguities of the concept. This is a project
that requires an historical sociology of concept formation. Here I sketch the outlines of this

terms. In doing so, I drawimplicationsfrom the researchprogramin generalprogrammatic from new political culture project discussed above and augment these by appropriating in heated combat: cultural sociology, science theories that sometimes have been engaged and studies, network and institutionalanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism.34

An Historical Sociology of Concept Formation

An historical sociology of social science concept formationentails three broaddimensions. First, it directs us to take a reflexive approachto social science concepts; second, it defines social science concepts as relational concepts-that is, they exist not as autonomous categoriesbut in relationalpatterns;and third,it treatssocial science concepts as historical and cultural objects, ratherthan as labels for naturalor given social phenomena. Reflexivity.The new political cultureconcept makes it possible to engage in a self-conscious conceptual reflexivity. Reflexivity-literally, turning back on the self-makes the original political culture concept itself the object of inquiry (the problem to be explained) rather than an unproblematiccategory of sociological research that is applied to other
34 The excuse for such shameless scavenging is that, despite numerous differences among approaches,they overlaparoundthemes and assumptionsthattogetherprovidethe foundationsfor an historicalsociology of concept formation.

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empirical data (Zimmermanand Pollner 1970). By contrast,Parsoniansuse the political culture concept as an explanatorytool to label those ideas and values which they theorize to be the chief factors in determiningpolitical systems. Habermasemploys the political culture concept as an analytic label for a set of communicative practices and rational institutions expressing bourgeois political interests. Making the political culture concept itself the dependent variable-that is, changing it from explanatorytool to problematic object-to-be-explained-generates a new set of questions: Whyand how and to what effect have social scientists had the particularidea that the social world contains something significant called a political culture? To answer these questions, a conceptual reflexivity requiresthat the political culture concept become its own reflexive instrument:to use the new political culture concept as a crucial component in explaining the old. A reflexive inversion, in short, makes it possible to examine the old political culture concept through the analytic lens of the new. Conceptsas relational objects. Once we have turnedthe political cultureconcept "back against itself' to make it the object of explanation,we can formulateand specify how we want to look at it.35An historical sociology of concept formationadopts a relationalrather than a categorical approach to the political culture concept. This can be clarified by contrastingit with the political sociology approach.As used by Habermasand the Parsonians, the political culture concept is a single autonomoussocial science category to which we ascribe a set of attributes,which then are specified in their empirical contexts. They offer two differentargumentsabout what the concept really is-that is, two answersto the question "Whatattributesrepresentingthe essence of the political culture concept should be includedmost appropriately the category?" This questionrepresentsan implicit theory in of concepts that Karl Popper ([1934]1959) called essentialist-a philosophy that looks to definitions of the essence of things for informationabout their true nature. In contrastto this essentialistapproach,or what recentlyhas been called the "categorical imperative"(Emirbayerand Goodwin 1994), an historical sociology of concept formation rejects asking what the political cultureconcept is. Insteadit examines the political culture concept as embedded in a relational configurationof concepts-a conceptual network consisting of social scientific concepts. Building from the new political culture'slegacy in structurallinguistics (see above on Saussure;also see Alexander 1990), one can conceive a conceptualnetworkas the matrixor the "field"(Bourdieuand Wacquant1992; Brubaker 1985) in which concepts are embedded. It is a web or a structuredconfigurationof relationshipsamong concepts that are connectedto each otherby virtueof sharingthe same conceptual net. The network concept directs us to look for the matrix of ties between elements and to seek the geometric shape of the patternsthey form. I take this to mean that concepts have relational identities because they are embedded in structuresand histories composed of configurationsand coordinates of ideas, epistemological rules of validity, culturallogics, and so on. That concepts have relational identities does not suggest that conceptual networks are holistic, consensual, or noncontested entities. Rather, it suggests the influence of the Foucaultian notion of the historically contingent but nonetheless internal integrity of a culturalpatternor logic, such that pragmaticchoices within this patternare regulatedby the pressures of meaningful consistency. Moreover, this pressure for patternedintegrity
35 A traditionalapproachmight assume that after we have observed phenomenawe form a concept, attach to it the observed set of attributes,and then discover objects that have those attributesand hence can be cited as examples of the concept. More fashionable in our postpositivist theory-drivensocial science culture is the assumptionthat the concept is formed first and then determineswhat attributesare gatheredunder its rubric.In practice, however, Hacking (1988) argues that this process does not work in either of those ways because we would not, in the first place, have "groupedindividualsor actions had we not producedknowledgeconnectingthe class with other classes" (Hacking 1988:54; emphasis added).

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within conceptual networks does not translate in any way into a coordinated, systemic integrityin the largerdomain of cultureas a whole which itself is composed of numerous, often competing conceptual networks,mediatedby a multiplicity of power relations.This larger domain is not subject at all to any single logic. Nor does this idea signal what may appear,at firstglance, to be a shift from the subjective to the objective conception of culture. As we are remindedby Stinchcombe(1982:78-80) and Alexander (1992b), if a phenomenonis indeed a form of culture-that is, a modality of meaning-it will have "mental," dimensions. moral, and normativeas well as structural Stinchcombeurges us to recognize that "a socially institutedcategory makes use of human mental capacities, whateverthey are . .." (1982:80). Alexander(1990:26) similarlyemphasizes this point: "We cannot understandculture without reference to subjective meaning, and we cannot understandit without reference to social structural constraints." More than the (probably) false distinction between subjective and objective, the most important definitional shift in an historical sociology of concept formation is away from thinking about a concept as a singularcategorical expression to regardingconcepts as embeddedin complex relational networksthat are both intersubjectiveand public.36 The most notable implication of this idea is that concepts in a conceptual network are not only related to each other in the weak sense of being contiguous;they are also related ontologically.That is, concepts cannotbe definedon theirown as single ontological entities; rather,the meaningof one concept can be decipheredonly in termsof its "place"in relation to the other concepts in its web (Levi-Strauss [1964]1969; Polanyi [1944]1959; White 1992).37What appearto be autonomouscategories defined by their attributesare reconceived more accurately as historically shifting sets of relationshipsthat are contingently an stabilized.38 Thus, insteadof employing a languageof categoriesand attributes, historical of concept formation builds from various approaches to relational thinking, sociology including structurallinguistics, and substitutesa language of networksand relationships. Concepts as historical and cultural objects. In the third step of an historical sociology of concept formation,the political cultureconcept is recognizedas an historicaland cultural object ratherthan what Durkheimcalled "natural objects"-by which he meant simply an abstractname for what appearsto be a "given"externalsocial object. To clarify, I contrast this again with the approachtaken by political sociology. Both Parsons and Habermas approachthe political cultureconcept by attemptingto arriveat a conceptualdefinitionthat reflects most clearly the concrete reality they are tryingto represent.Then they evaluatethe quality of their definitionby the goodness of fit between the label and the externalconcrete social reality it represents. Recall that the new political culture project challenges this assumption by arguing that social practices and political ideas must be reconceived as historical and cultural objects in and of themselves, ratherthan as reflections of external social phenomena. Yet practitionersof the new political culture concept do not always follow throughon its most radical epistemological implications. The new political culture concept is still a
36 Indeed, this focus on culture as an attributeof a particular category of person (e.g., a bourgeois hommeand an a capitalist,a Protestant, American)joins most closely the Parsonianwith the Marxistmodel of politicalculture. Neither model denies that cultural spheres exist independentlyof subjective minds. For Parsons, for example, view of the culturaldomain was a majorcontribution; similarly,Habermas'sconcept of introducingthe tripartite handle on culture.Each of these approachespresumes,and the relational a public sphere gives us an "objective" approachcalls into question, that at the level of ontology (that is, what is the essence of this thing called culture?) the cultural sphere, like the culturalvalues, is an expression of categorical attributes. 37 The term place in relationalitycomes from Polanyi (1957); for empirical application see Somers (1993). Another similar expression is that of "positions"in a "field"(see, e.g., Bourdieuand Wacquant1992). 38 The similarityof this idea to White's (1992) relationaltheory of identityis discussed below.

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label for something else-in this case, political ideas of (say) French workers,expressed through linguistic systems and ritualisticpractices. Although they offer a new version of what the political culture concept is, cultural historians do not break completely with essentialism. Thus their work stops short of a thoroughgoingreflexivity that would make the political culture concept itself a culturalobject subjectedto critical scrutiny. An historical sociology of concept formationthus builds on the foundationlaid by the new political cultureprojectto arguethatjust as political ideas and social practicesare not abstractreflections of external social attributes,so must our own social science concepts be understoodnot as given categories with naturalattributes as cultural and historical but objects embeddedin symbolic and historicallyconstructedculturalstructuresand assigned meaning by their location in those structures.Recognizing social science ideas as cultural objects is hardly new, of course. It began with Durkheimand continuedwith his students and descendants Mauss, Levi-Strauss, and Halbwachs. In a move that far foreshadowed Foucault,Durkheimrecognized that our most primordiallogical categories of time, space, and causality are social creations (Durkheimand Mauss [1903]1963 Vol. 2).39 Here the theoreticallinks become explicit between culturalhistoriansand sociologists, on the one side, and structuralsociologists and network and institutionalanalysis, on the other (Emirbayer Goodwin 1994; Powell and DiMaggio 1991; Wellman1983; Wellman and and Berkowitz 1988; White 1992). Tilly, for example, reminds us of the depth of the relationalityof identity when he tells us, perhaps having in mind the famous story The Returnof Martin Guerre, that "the ability to simulate or reconstruct. . . relationships... in fact allows imposture:By falsely claiming the same set of relationships,one organism can assume the identity of another. . . . Eventually we must find the means of placing relationshipsratherthan individualsat the very center of the analysis"(1984:27, 32). The new institutionalanalysis suggests that culturalstructures join together differentelements in what DiMaggio and Powell (1991:14) call "loosely coupled arrays of standardized elements." Once cultural patternsare recognized as patterns,and are recognized to have some rule-bound existence outside individuals'minds and social practices, they can be understood sociologically as deeply implicated in our understandingof how institutions work (DiMaggio and Powell 1991). Above all, the extensive work thathas flourishedrecentlyin the sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and history of science has contributedmost to the approachsuggested here, with its emphasison the historicityof knowledge (Canguilhem[1966]1978, 1988; Foucault, e.g., 1972a [1970]1973, 1977, [1966]1978; Geertz 1973, 1983; Gutting 1989; Hacking 1979, 1990a; Kuhn 1970; Shapin and Schaffer 1986), epistemological reflexivity (KnorrCetina and Mulkay 1983; Woolgar 1988, 1992), and networkapproachesto social science knowledge (Latour1993; Pickering1984, 1992, 1993). This work demandsthatwe question and problematizeas historical objects much of what has long been taken to have been discovered in science. Following Latour (1988:68), an historical sociology of concept formationtakes it that a concept "neversurvives beyond the narrownetworksof practices and circumstancesthat defines its validity."Unlike Latour,however, I am far from convinced that such networks of practices are always so "narrow." the contrary,the On relationshipsthat I will examine in this historical sociology of concept formationare very

39 In doing so, Durkheim also produced a socialized version of Kant's famous distinction between noumena and phenomena,often recognized in philosophy as nominalism.More recently, ethnomethodologistshave made problematicthe discourse and practiceof the humansciences, findingthat "scientificaccountsof humanbehavior are themselves permeatedby rich, subtle practicesand assumptionswhich are typically ignoredand unrecognized" (Pollner 1987:ix).

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wide and deep historically-the kinds of structures that Sewell (1992:24) defines as having that "high depth"and so much "durability" they appearalmost to be second nature. In sum, three aspects of an historical sociology of concept formationcan be identifiedits reflexivity,its relationality,and its recognitionof social science concepts as culturaland historical objects. This sociology weaves together two distinct strands in the human sciences. The first tradition-that of the history and sociology of culture, structuralism, and networkanalysis-finds thatculturalobjects must be understoodin relationto otherobjects. The second tradition-that of science studies-extends this observationto the concepts of the humansciences themselves. An historicalsociology of concept formationis inspiredby both the structuraland the reflexive traditions,and assumes a form that resembles neither in its entirety. From this perspective, the political culture concept and all social science concepts lack naturesor essences; instead they have histories, networks,and narratives. the In an articleto follow, I demonstrate historicalempiricalapplicabilityof this research the central place of the political culture concept in the conceptual programby examining network of Anglo-Americancitizenship theory.

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